But this approach can provide us with movie(HDDVDRIP).avi - don't boast you cracked the key, don't publish it. Just crack it, rip the movie and release the rip. This way they can revoke any keys they want, they can keep guessing which is your player and innocent people hit with their actions will just turn away from them and download your rip, stripped of all DRM and key/device info.
The difference being that a good paper book is definitely the best medium for reading. No e-book readers, no xeros, no audiobooks can replace it. Meanwhile what RIAA and MPAA are pushing as the "official standart" is about the worst there is. 6o minutes of music on a disk that won't fit in a pocket. Forced commercials before the movie. Disks preloaded with crapware that breaks your computer and makes them unplayable in car CD players. For many people the first thing after buying a CD is to rip it to mp3, upload to mp3 player and store the disk away, never returning to it. Who's to scan and OCR a newly-bought book and read it from their laptop?
- avoid "famous brands", like Duracell, Philips etc. You pay premium for the name while the quality doesn't change.
- Capacity - same as with HDDs except you get amper-hours per dollar, instead of gigabytes/$. If you want to bother, calculate mAh/$ ratio for all available and pick the best. If you don't, the rule of thumb is to pick a notch or two below the highest available on market. With smaller you pay extra for costs common to manufacturing any capacity, with bigger you pay extra for cutting edge.
- make sure you get a matching charger. Some don't work with lower capacities, some with high. Good bargains for rechargables+chargers can be found. Chargers without auto-off suck.
- all rechargables discharge by themselves over time. If you use them in remotes etc, prepare for recharging bi-weekly or so. Sucks. Use in devices you use a lot. It still pays with wireless mouse/keyboard too.
- It's good to get two sets for each device, one charging, one in use. If you want the cheaper way, get one set of normal cheap batteries for time when the rechargables recharge. Remember to replace as soon as the rechargables are charged.
- Despite what they say on the packages, you can recharge standard single-use Alkalines - about 2-5 times (as opposed to hundreds with rechargables) with a slow charger. Just in case, place the charger with batteries down, on a surface that's easy to clean and not expensive, don't leave unattended and if it's not auto-off, unplug before they reach designated full capacity (that's when they start to heat up and are most prone to explode.)
The article Why Ajax Sucks (Most of the Time) is a nice spoof of an old article about frames. Despite being a spoof, the word 'frames' replaced by 'ajax' and little else changed, it's surprisingly accurate and nicely outlines WHY it's harmful.
1. Prepare malicious javascript code capable of subverting AJAX in the domain it's installed in. 2. ??? 3. Subvert their AJAX, intercept their communications, change their content, kill the Web as we know it, and ultimately, profit!!!
I must say the moment I launched my first nuke at a city in Defcon, I felt really bad about it, and seeing "MOSCOW HIT 3.2 MILLIONS DEAD" really got me thinking. But now I launch dozens of nukes at capitol city of my country without remorse.
Oh, you're quite wrong here. Employee-managed (and operated, with the employee being the subject of display) kiosks are quite important and successful branch of the sexual entertainment industry.
Is someone looking at some random C code for 2 seconds and saying "this code is perfect !" realistic ?
Absolutely. Must be from management.
Is stealing code using videos cameras hidden in the developers houses realistic ? Especially when this code is open source and available on the internet.
Yeah, "Here's your code. I downloaded it from the legal, open FTP site. Now pay me $50000." vs "I hacked into their security system and used their cameras, like this, to grab the screen contents from developers' screens. Here's the code *hands them what he downloaded from the FTP* Now pay me $50000"
Half the work for really easy big bucks is to install the right smoke and mirrors. Movie industry being the proof.
I do. I began recently, after being watch-hostile for over 25 years. I was one and at first wore it because it was a gift, with intention to get rid of it ASAP, but I found out that it's good, comfortable, precise and doesn't fail like the $3 watches I kept having bad experiences with ('fix it for me please!') and I found it WAY more comfortable to peek at my wrist than to dig in my pocket for the phone or bend over the computer to see the system tray, or peer into dark dashboard of the car, or turn back to see the clock on the wall behind and so on. A wrist-watch is really more comfortable - under one condition, that is its quality is sufficient that it doesn't become a nuisance.
Now I'm pondering some 'integration' again - pick a watch with some other handy functionalities. Any suggestions?
The problem is that in a good challenging game you can scale the difficulty, take a hard challenge, fail, then step back to easier areas to beef up your character and try again. In Oblivion there's no scaling back. You can't pick an easier cave or less difficult quest to make your character stronger, and you won't face a surprise battle against overwhelming odds which would force you to retreat - at given time every enemy in every location all over Cyrodiil is about as difficult, sometimes too difficult, sometimes too easy. You just got your ass kicked by a faded wraith? You return to a cave where you kicked goblins' asses but now it's full of shamans, berserkers, and the goblins kick you the same as the wraith. You try bandits, and bandits kill you. You try to scale back and do some non-combat missions to raise your parameters, and as you level up, your combat parameters remain pathetic and the enemy gets even stronger. OTOH if you concentrate on battle-related parameters and you start a fighter/battlemage career from the very beginning, neglecting any thieving, social, assist magic or whatever that makes a true role-playing of a character other than "Conan the barbarian" or "almighty mage", you can easily reach unmatched power which removes any challenge from the game. The problem is that the 'level' parameter corresponds directly with enemy power but is hardly related to player's power - start a 'conjurer' class and play it like it was a barbarian without knowledge of magic, and before you reach level 3 you can swipe storm atronachs with bare hands. Start a 'thief' and play according to the lore and at level 20 you find closing an oblivion gate is simply impossible. The game punishes you for role-playing your chosen role, excluding the two mentioned stereotypes, and rewards for straying as far as possible from chosen proffession - your parameters rise while enemy power doesn't.
There's a serious difference here though. Upgrade of Solaris goes almost transparently. You load the upgrade, tweak a dozen of config files of so, reboot and the system starts up. On Windows upgrade starts with disk format. Whatever you had on your system needs to be installed from scratch. Years of customization go to hell and you start with a blank harddrive with new system, to which you must install all the software, all the data sources, all the configuration. Upgrade from 2.6 to 2.7 is just upgrade, replace updated files, keep the rest. Upgrade from w2k to w2k3server is more like OS change - destroy old system, install new, rebuild contents from scratch.
Yep. The list of unlevelled items that are not a part of level-dependent quests is about 10 positions long. Including items like Fin Gleam (a helmet somewhere far off shore on the bottom of the ocean, no hints as to location or even existence of it) or a ring lying on top of a fort wall somewhere in the wilderness.
Blah, FPS optimizer maybe doubles view distance but then square borders start showing up (are clearly visible when set to max), and that's not very immersive. I'd love if Morrowind could create something like LOD far landscape from Oblivion, where you could see both Vivec and Dagon Fel from top of Red Mountain after finishing the main quest.
Doesn't it make sense that this sort of character would be very weak in direct combat, assuming it only developed its major skills, even at level 40+?
Yes, but a well-ballanced game would make it still possible, even easy (level 40!) for such a character to finish. An alteration 'shield' spell that wouldn't be useless. Sneak that actually works and is possible to pull off in most of quests. Speechcraft allowing you to bluff and befriend most of essential enemies.
Actually, if you really wanted to finish the game with this character, you could - using alchemy (tons of poisons and restore magicka and health potions) plus illusion (short-duration invisibility spammed throughout most of the game) but the gameplay would be really crap, poison sword, hit, cast invis, repeat. Oh, and you'd be screwed against undead, immune to poison.
The main gripe is that the result of the 'levelled everything' idea is that the game is a total bitch to any player that isn't a fighter, a mage or a combination thereof. Try to play a stealth-based character, and around level 12 you'll wind enemies own your ass as they like. Your sneak skill is nearly useless even at master level, your attack strength even with sneak bonus is pathetic, most of quests require you to kill all the enemies and make it impossible to sneak past them, social skills like speechcraft, mercantile etc are useless, bow weapons are pathetic more often than not, acrobatics which should easily get you out of reach of clumzier enemies is useless (and many good sniping spots are blocked off by invisible walls to prevent this!) and you keep gaining levels making you unable to slow down and catch up on skills against the enemies.
Plus levelled merchants and levelled loot mean that you can patiently spend time doing well-paying jobs and save up lots of money then stick them up your ass because no merchant wants to sell you anything better than chainmail, and you can raid 200 ayleid ruins and you won't find a single piece of elven armour because your level is too low.
I thought the enemies that level up with you were a masterstroke. The execution left something to be desired, but they essentially eliminated my number-one RPG gripe: grinding.
Are you sure we're talking about the same vanilla unmodded Oblivion? Essentially they removed artificial block of grinding, but instead introduced a natural "grind or die" difficulty-based one. And what's worse, you can't go back and grind more, if you skip some grinding you're screwed. Scenario 1: Pick a custom class with major skills of Sneak, Security, Speechcraft, Alchemy, Conjuration, Alteration and Illusion. As soon as you exit the sewers you can start using your skills as much as you can, increasing your levels really fast. In matter of 4-5 hours you can be a level 40 character. But the moment you exit the city you'll be totally obliterated by the first enemy you find. So you choose... scenario 2: Custom class with skills of Armourer, Light Armour (you always wear heavy), Blunt, Hand to Hand, Conjuration, Alteration and Illusion (you never use them), then you avoid using your major skills as much as possible. After 5 days of gameplay you're level 4 and you kick major ass. If you want to advance to level 5, you spend a day grinding your minor skills, then 15 minutes training major skills to get highest possible attribute bonuses while not advancing the enemies too much. You must grind a lot and proceed very cautiously if you don't want to lose your advantage and make the enemies much harder while not growing much stronger yourself.
Of course mods can fix it. Mods can fix everything. But don't count them here. Bethesda screwed up a big time and fans fixed it, so now Bethesda is getting awards? uh...
Did somebody pay somebody else to have this terrible game given the award or are simply all the others even worse than Oblivion?
Before you mark this as flamebait: If you compare Oblivion with its precedesor, Morrowind, which was good but not ultimately great, Oblivion has -everything- worse than Morrowind, with exception of graphics. Worse gameplay, more shallow plotline, smaller quest tree, lower quest variablity, fewer guilds, worse stability, fewer skills, spells, cities, NPCs, and above all no point in advancing the character, because the enemies are chosen depending on your level and growing harder faster than you gain advantages from high levels, meaning you are punished for progress, the longer you play the harder it gets.
Slashdot Mirror
cat soup is already banned due to bad PR
But this approach can provide us with movie(HDDVDRIP).avi - don't boast you cracked the key, don't publish it. Just crack it, rip the movie and release the rip. This way they can revoke any keys they want, they can keep guessing which is your player and innocent people hit with their actions will just turn away from them and download your rip, stripped of all DRM and key/device info.
The difference being that a good paper book is definitely the best medium for reading. No e-book readers, no xeros, no audiobooks can replace it. Meanwhile what RIAA and MPAA are pushing as the "official standart" is about the worst there is. 6o minutes of music on a disk that won't fit in a pocket. Forced commercials before the movie. Disks preloaded with crapware that breaks your computer and makes them unplayable in car CD players. For many people the first thing after buying a CD is to rip it to mp3, upload to mp3 player and store the disk away, never returning to it. Who's to scan and OCR a newly-bought book and read it from their laptop?
- avoid "famous brands", like Duracell, Philips etc. You pay premium for the name while the quality doesn't change.
- Capacity - same as with HDDs except you get amper-hours per dollar, instead of gigabytes/$. If you want to bother, calculate mAh/$ ratio for all available and pick the best. If you don't, the rule of thumb is to pick a notch or two below the highest available on market. With smaller you pay extra for costs common to manufacturing any capacity, with bigger you pay extra for cutting edge.
- make sure you get a matching charger. Some don't work with lower capacities, some with high. Good bargains for rechargables+chargers can be found. Chargers without auto-off suck.
- all rechargables discharge by themselves over time. If you use them in remotes etc, prepare for recharging bi-weekly or so. Sucks. Use in devices you use a lot. It still pays with wireless mouse/keyboard too.
- It's good to get two sets for each device, one charging, one in use. If you want the cheaper way, get one set of normal cheap batteries for time when the rechargables recharge. Remember to replace as soon as the rechargables are charged.
- Despite what they say on the packages, you can recharge standard single-use Alkalines - about 2-5 times (as opposed to hundreds with rechargables) with a slow charger. Just in case, place the charger with batteries down, on a surface that's easy to clean and not expensive, don't leave unattended and if it's not auto-off, unplug before they reach designated full capacity (that's when they start to heat up and are most prone to explode.)
Now that's something that won't happen to you in the First Life!
Ajax sucks. Not because of security.
The article Why Ajax Sucks (Most of the Time) is a nice spoof of an old article about frames. Despite being a spoof, the word 'frames' replaced by 'ajax' and little else changed, it's surprisingly accurate and nicely outlines WHY it's harmful.
1. Prepare malicious javascript code capable of subverting AJAX in the domain it's installed in.
2. ???
3. Subvert their AJAX, intercept their communications, change their content, kill the Web as we know it, and ultimately, profit!!!
I must say the moment I launched my first nuke at a city in Defcon, I felt really bad about it, and seeing "MOSCOW HIT 3.2 MILLIONS DEAD" really got me thinking. But now I launch dozens of nukes at capitol city of my country without remorse.
Requiring a employee-managed kiosk is a bad idea.
Oh, you're quite wrong here. Employee-managed (and operated, with the employee being the subject of display) kiosks are quite important and successful branch of the sexual entertainment industry.
Is someone looking at some random C code for 2 seconds and saying "this code is perfect !" realistic ?
Absolutely. Must be from management.
Is stealing code using videos cameras hidden in the developers houses realistic ? Especially when this code is open source and available on the internet.
Yeah, "Here's your code. I downloaded it from the legal, open FTP site. Now pay me $50000." vs "I hacked into their security system and used their cameras, like this, to grab the screen contents from developers' screens. Here's the code *hands them what he downloaded from the FTP* Now pay me $50000"
Half the work for really easy big bucks is to install the right smoke and mirrors. Movie industry being the proof.
I'm not a native english speaker, so the mistake was understandable - at first I was sure you mean handcuffs. Appropriate too.
I'd rather go electronic. Cost aside, it wouldn't weight 1.1kg
I wonder what you and the AC think of electronic watches with LCD hands instead of digits. :) :)
All the bad points of both
If it's an exact or nearly-exact replica, it infringes on copyright of the design.
Seen some of the spams? They quite often fail to mention it's not genuine rolex.
...cheap knock-offs of the luxury are on the rise too.
With extremely aggressive marketing.
Unfortunately.
I wonder, couldn't Rolex sue for trademark infringement or damaging brand reputation or something? These spammers make me loathe the name.
I do. I began recently, after being watch-hostile for over 25 years. I was one and at first wore it because it was a gift, with intention to get rid of it ASAP, but I found out that it's good, comfortable, precise and doesn't fail like the $3 watches I kept having bad experiences with ('fix it for me please!') and I found it WAY more comfortable to peek at my wrist than to dig in my pocket for the phone or bend over the computer to see the system tray, or peer into dark dashboard of the car, or turn back to see the clock on the wall behind and so on. A wrist-watch is really more comfortable - under one condition, that is its quality is sufficient that it doesn't become a nuisance.
Now I'm pondering some 'integration' again - pick a watch with some other handy functionalities. Any suggestions?
The problem is that in a good challenging game you can scale the difficulty, take a hard challenge, fail, then step back to easier areas to beef up your character and try again. In Oblivion there's no scaling back. You can't pick an easier cave or less difficult quest to make your character stronger, and you won't face a surprise battle against overwhelming odds which would force you to retreat - at given time every enemy in every location all over Cyrodiil is about as difficult, sometimes too difficult, sometimes too easy. You just got your ass kicked by a faded wraith? You return to a cave where you kicked goblins' asses but now it's full of shamans, berserkers, and the goblins kick you the same as the wraith. You try bandits, and bandits kill you. You try to scale back and do some non-combat missions to raise your parameters, and as you level up, your combat parameters remain pathetic and the enemy gets even stronger. OTOH if you concentrate on battle-related parameters and you start a fighter/battlemage career from the very beginning, neglecting any thieving, social, assist magic or whatever that makes a true role-playing of a character other than "Conan the barbarian" or "almighty mage", you can easily reach unmatched power which removes any challenge from the game. The problem is that the 'level' parameter corresponds directly with enemy power but is hardly related to player's power - start a 'conjurer' class and play it like it was a barbarian without knowledge of magic, and before you reach level 3 you can swipe storm atronachs with bare hands. Start a 'thief' and play according to the lore and at level 20 you find closing an oblivion gate is simply impossible. The game punishes you for role-playing your chosen role, excluding the two mentioned stereotypes, and rewards for straying as far as possible from chosen proffession - your parameters rise while enemy power doesn't.
There's a serious difference here though.
Upgrade of Solaris goes almost transparently. You load the upgrade, tweak a dozen of config files of so, reboot and the system starts up. On Windows upgrade starts with disk format. Whatever you had on your system needs to be installed from scratch. Years of customization go to hell and you start with a blank harddrive with new system, to which you must install all the software, all the data sources, all the configuration. Upgrade from 2.6 to 2.7 is just upgrade, replace updated files, keep the rest. Upgrade from w2k to w2k3server is more like OS change - destroy old system, install new, rebuild contents from scratch.
Zero-day warez - yep, you're right.
Zero-day exploits - exploit to unpatched vulnerablity.
DDR RAM isn't a dance training device either.
Yep. The list of unlevelled items that are not a part of level-dependent quests is about 10 positions long. Including items like Fin Gleam (a helmet somewhere far off shore on the bottom of the ocean, no hints as to location or even existence of it) or a ring lying on top of a fort wall somewhere in the wilderness.
Blah, FPS optimizer maybe doubles view distance but then square borders start showing up (are clearly visible when set to max), and that's not very immersive. I'd love if Morrowind could create something like LOD far landscape from Oblivion, where you could see both Vivec and Dagon Fel from top of Red Mountain after finishing the main quest.
Doesn't it make sense that this sort of character would be very weak in direct combat, assuming it only developed its major skills, even at level 40+?
Yes, but a well-ballanced game would make it still possible, even easy (level 40!) for such a character to finish. An alteration 'shield' spell that wouldn't be useless. Sneak that actually works and is possible to pull off in most of quests. Speechcraft allowing you to bluff and befriend most of essential enemies.
Actually, if you really wanted to finish the game with this character, you could - using alchemy (tons of poisons and restore magicka and health potions) plus illusion (short-duration invisibility spammed throughout most of the game) but the gameplay would be really crap, poison sword, hit, cast invis, repeat. Oh, and you'd be screwed against undead, immune to poison.
The main gripe is that the result of the 'levelled everything' idea is that the game is a total bitch to any player that isn't a fighter, a mage or a combination thereof. Try to play a stealth-based character, and around level 12 you'll wind enemies own your ass as they like. Your sneak skill is nearly useless even at master level, your attack strength even with sneak bonus is pathetic, most of quests require you to kill all the enemies and make it impossible to sneak past them, social skills like speechcraft, mercantile etc are useless, bow weapons are pathetic more often than not, acrobatics which should easily get you out of reach of clumzier enemies is useless (and many good sniping spots are blocked off by invisible walls to prevent this!) and you keep gaining levels making you unable to slow down and catch up on skills against the enemies.
Plus levelled merchants and levelled loot mean that you can patiently spend time doing well-paying jobs and save up lots of money then stick them up your ass because no merchant wants to sell you anything better than chainmail, and you can raid 200 ayleid ruins and you won't find a single piece of elven armour because your level is too low.
I thought the enemies that level up with you were a masterstroke. The execution left something to be desired, but they essentially eliminated my number-one RPG gripe: grinding.
Are you sure we're talking about the same vanilla unmodded Oblivion?
Essentially they removed artificial block of grinding, but instead introduced a natural "grind or die" difficulty-based one. And what's worse, you can't go back and grind more, if you skip some grinding you're screwed.
Scenario 1: Pick a custom class with major skills of Sneak, Security, Speechcraft, Alchemy, Conjuration, Alteration and Illusion. As soon as you exit the sewers you can start using your skills as much as you can, increasing your levels really fast. In matter of 4-5 hours you can be a level 40 character. But the moment you exit the city you'll be totally obliterated by the first enemy you find. So you choose...
scenario 2: Custom class with skills of Armourer, Light Armour (you always wear heavy), Blunt, Hand to Hand, Conjuration, Alteration and Illusion (you never use them), then you avoid using your major skills as much as possible. After 5 days of gameplay you're level 4 and you kick major ass. If you want to advance to level 5, you spend a day grinding your minor skills, then 15 minutes training major skills to get highest possible attribute bonuses while not advancing the enemies too much. You must grind a lot and proceed very cautiously if you don't want to lose your advantage and make the enemies much harder while not growing much stronger yourself.
Of course mods can fix it. Mods can fix everything. But don't count them here. Bethesda screwed up a big time and fans fixed it, so now Bethesda is getting awards? uh...
Did somebody pay somebody else to have this terrible game given the award or are simply all the others even worse than Oblivion?
Before you mark this as flamebait:
If you compare Oblivion with its precedesor, Morrowind, which was good but not ultimately great, Oblivion has -everything- worse than Morrowind, with exception of graphics. Worse gameplay, more shallow plotline, smaller quest tree, lower quest variablity, fewer guilds, worse stability, fewer skills, spells, cities, NPCs, and above all no point in advancing the character, because the enemies are chosen depending on your level and growing harder faster than you gain advantages from high levels, meaning you are punished for progress, the longer you play the harder it gets.